In the context of the new Capita Selecta course ‘A global sense of place’ several guest lectures are organized by the Rural Sociology Group. These lectures are open for all students, PhD’s and staff members. Coming up are the following events, please join! More information: lummina.horlings@wur.nl.
Monday May 23th (15.30-17.00, room C63): Will Day.
Will Day is a PhD candidate in Harvard University’s dual PhD program in Middle Eastern Studies and Social Anthropology. His main interests are in economic and political anthropology, Marxist thought and its legacy in anthropology, urbanization and urban political economies defined by displacement and dispossession, and political geography and political ecology. He has carried out two years of ethnographic fieldwork in Diyarbakir, Turkey (June 2007-June 2009). His dissertation is focused on urban livelihoods and cultural politics in Diyarbakir the wake of massive state counterinsurgency campaigns that led to the displacement and dispossession of, very likely, well over 1,000,000 rural Kurds. He is interested in how family histories of rural displacement and dispossession and subsequent urban realities of mass unemployment have resulting in the transformation of not only the practices of work, but also the meaning of productivity, work, and masculinity, wealth, value, masculinity, and, ultimately, political belonging and citizenship and the imagination of political futures in this space of rapid and radical political economic transformations.
Content of the lecture: Will Day will talk about urban development in a place in Turkey. He will focus on ”political economy and urban livelihoods in the city through the lens of Massey’s concepts about thinking spatially which might help to clarify what it means to think of a space (a city, a village, etc) as less a fixed, stable entity and more a temporary, contingent crystallization of dynamic processes that link localities to wider geographies and relations of political community, economic life, and cultural imagination”.
Monday May 30th (15.30-17.00, room C63): Joks Janssen
Cultural planning and regional development: between trend and tradition. Joks Janssen is professor Spatial Planning and cultural history and fulfills the special chair Belvedere, WUR. He also works at the province of North-Brabant. Content of guest lecture: “Regions, once seen as complementary elements in integrated national economies, are now seen as competitors within European and global markets. As a consequence, a new regional development paradigm has emerged, emphasizing the region as the subject rather than the object of policy. One effect of the process of regionalization has been to provoke a new interest in culture. Nowadays, the conditions for regional development do not depend upon hard infrastructures but on soft infrastructures, among which culture occupies a privileged position. Culture is seen as a prerequisite for creative and innovative environments. This lecture reflects on planning a regional territory having culture in mind. What are the dilemma’s and opportunities when culture is promoted by cities and regions? How to link development, and particularly local development with culture effectively?”
Date Monday June 20th (15.30-17.00, C63) Styn Oosterlinck
Oosterlinck is Assistant Professor at the department of Sociology at the University of Antwerp, where he teaches courses on urban sociology, poverty and inequality and social stratification. He is a member of the Research Centre on Poverty, Social Inequality, Exclusion and the City (OASeS) and post-doctoral fellow of the Fund for Scientific Research – Flanders at the Department of Architecture, Urbanism and Spatial Planning at the University of Leuven. His post-doctoral research project is concerned with local development coalitions and social innovation in disadvantaged urban neighbourhoods in Belgian cities.
Wednesday June 22th (13.30- ca. 15.00, room to be announced): Sylvia Hermann
Dr Sylvia Herman guest lecture is part of the Wageningen School of Social Sciences (WASS) seminars. She is affiliated at the Institute for Umweltplanung, Leipniz University Hannover and was coordinator of the EU-funded research project RUFUS (www.rufus-eu.de). Based on the findings of RUFUS Sylvia Hermann pleads for place-based policy and planning to cope with rural diversity in the EU.